Thursday, July 12, 2007

For decades companies develop there own software or purchase form vendors and run the applications in their own infrastructure. But things are changed now. Availability of high bandwidth network, powerful processors and inexpensive storage and increase in cost of maintenance changed the complete delivery model. Software as a Service is a new delivery model where companies pay not for owning the software itself but for using it. In the SaaS scenario, a software provider is responsible for its availability (maintenance, scalability, disaster recovery, etc.). That’s what the companies pay for.

Last few months Microsoft has being talking a lot about a new buzz "Software Plus services" in all of the major conferences like Microsoft partner's conference , MIX, TechEd .Actually it is not a new methodology. It has been used by many companies like Apple and Google for years. Microsoft is going to use the same strategy for the new lines of products like Microsoft Live, Microsoft Live CRM etc.So what software plus services is the delivery model where enterprises will have choice of including on-premises solutions and hosted solutions.

Jon DeVadoss, Director of Architecture Strategy Microsoft Corporation mentioned in one of the his keynote address that the notion of Software Plus Services is a convergence of software as a service (SaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technologies.

But if we change the software plus services to services plus software it changes the complete delivery model. Services plus software approach would put the software on the server, rather than the desktop, and much of the complexity with it.